Get help improving your financial operations and decision making ability without hiring additional staff. If you’d like streamlined processes, improved cash flow and a dynamic accounting system with real time reports and meaningful metrics – all on an integrated platform, our seasoned team of professionals can help you to meet your operational needs. Consultance takes care of all of your bookkeeping and accounting needs, so you can focus on managing your organization.

ThreeKey Reasons to Love Your Accountant

Valentine’s Day is this week! Your accountant is probably not the first person you think of on February 14th, but in honor of this holiday, I give you three key reasons to love your accountant:

We enable you to make better business decisions and focus on what matters most.
If you are doing your own bookkeeping and accounting, you may be feeling the strain of wearing too many hats in your business or not-for-profit organization. Delegating your accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll and other accounting processes to a competent accountant allows you to focus on your customers, clients and/or members. While you get back to doing what you love, your accounting professional helps you understand key performance measures, such as your most and least profitable lines of business, your return on investment from fundraising efforts, and/or the best pricing levels for your products and services to maximize your profit margins.

We standardize and streamline your back office functions.
Your accountant understands your workflows and through standardization, can significantly reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes. By consistent handling of your back office operations, your accounting professional helps your business or organization to run more efficiently.

We understand how technology can increase your productivity and security.
While you focus on keeping up with the latest ways to enhance services for your customers, clients and/or members, your accountant is focused on knowing how innovative accounting technology can improve your back office functions, both in terms of efficiencies as well as security measures. Your accounting professional can implement cloud-based technology in your office, so that you can experience the benefits of automation, integration, collaboration and mobility.

Having a competent, professional accountant can make a big difference to your business or not-for-profit organization’s success. If you currently don’t have an accountant and/or are not experiencing the above benefits, contact us; I’d be happy to discuss ways to enhance your business practices through innovative accounting solutions.

Keep Your Payroll in Order and Your Employees Happy

If you’re like most companies, whether you’re a commercial business or a not for profit organization, employees are your most valued assets. In order to attract and retain a strong employee base, it’s important to get your Payroll process running right. Here are some tips to optimizing your Payroll process:

Use a third party Payroll service provider: You may be doing Payroll in-house now using some type of software. However, as you grow, there are benefits to having a Payroll service provider do this work, since the process is often detailed and tedious, and can cause major issues if not done correctly. Outsourcing your payroll function saves you the cost of an internal staff person. Or, if you’re a smaller company, you may be doing this pain-staking process yourself; think of all the time you could free up to focus on growing your business.

There are several companies who specialize in providing full services for Payroll, including the processing of benefits, W-2’s and government tax filings. Since Payroll is their key competency, you can rely on their expertise and feel confident that they are using the most up-to-date software and tax tables. And, if you’re like many companies who worry about the security of your in-house technologies, you can gain peace of mind by outsourcing to a company with more state of the art security protocols. You can also minimize the likelihood of IRS penalties for late or inaccurate filings, since these professionals are experts at what they do, and can facilitate your proper compliance with the appropriate external authorities.

Click here for more info more info on Choosing a Payroll Service Provider: Pros and Cons

Streamline and enhance your Payroll process: To make your Payroll process run as effectively as possible, consider the following:

• Integrate with your Accounting system: Consider a payroll service that can integrates with your accounting system. For example, many small businesses who use QuickBooks Online also use its Payroll solution. This enables you to automatically update your books for Payroll-related activity, which eliminates the extra steps of having to import data files and do double data entry.

• Understand your People costs: People costs are often the largest line item expense on a company’s financial statements. Managing and accounting for this time is an important priority for successful businesses. If you aren’t currently allocating and tracking staff’s time spent on programs, customers, jobs, or other important categories relevant to your business, you are likely missing out on some important information. Consider implementing a time management system that integrates with your Payroll and Accounting systems. This enables you to see actionable information, and can inform your decisions about staffing and pricing strategies.

• Don’t forget about internal controls: Even if you outsource your Payroll process, you’re still responsible for ensuring strong internal controls for your organization. Therefore, when searching for payroll service providers, be prepared with specific questions that deal with access and security and disaster recovery controls. Once you choose a provider, make sure your contract addresses those areas. Encourage your employees to choose direct deposits, since paper checks are more vulnerable to fraudulent transactions. And, to prevent payroll errors, institute review steps in the process, such as management review and approval of time cards and changes to your payroll information (e.g., new employees, changes in salary, etc.).

How Consultance Accounting can help: As a virtual accounting firm who performs outsourced accounting services for small and medium-sized businesses, we can perform your bookkeeping and accounting services, to include processing, recording and reconciling your Payroll. We use cloud-based technologies that integrate with each other to streamline the process. This includes automating your time-tracking process, using Tsheets, and customizing it to your company’s specific needs and industry requirements. We can also set up mobile option, which provides flexibility for employees who are on the road. We’ll implement job costing and ensure your timekeeping system is integrated with your Payroll and accounting systems. We’ll show you to generate and interpret meaningful reports so that you can make better business decisions.

Here are some tips to help your year-end accounting process run smoothly. Planning ahead will help you have accurate and timely financial statements, facilitate tax preparation, and meet filing deadlines:

W-2 and 1099 processing: Employees and certain independent consultants must receive their appropriate forms by January 31st. Start planning now by confirming that you have the necessary and accurate information. Verify your employees’ filing status and their mailing addresses. Also confirm that your contractors’ Form W-9 information (e.g., tax identification numbers) is up-to-date. To facilitate e-filings, gather email addresses for all contractors so that you can email them their 1099s. January 31st is also the deadline for filing your government copies of W-2 and 1099 forms. If you have a third party provider who files these forms on your behalf, discuss the process with them now to ensure they have the information needed to file timely.

Accounts Receivable and Payables: At year-end, it’s a good practice to review these accounts for any long-outstanding items that may require potential write-offs.

Inventory: If you have inventory, ensure any required year-end physical inventory counts are completed timely.

Property, Plant & Equipment (Fixed Assets): Make sure you’ve accounted for any additions and deletions made during the year, as well as entries for depreciation or amortization.

Proper Account Coding: Take care of any outstanding items, such as entries that haven’t been categorized to their appropriate accounts yet. If you aren’t sure how to account for certain activity, check in with your accountant.

New Activity: If you anticipate any new activity occurring on or around year-end, alert your accountant so that he/she can ensure those the activity is properly recorded in the books. This includes new contracts having financial impact, special employee bonuses, new loans or loan pay-offs, etc.

Cash Management/Year-end Expenditures: If you’re on a cash-basis for tax purposes, review your available cash on hand; it might be a good opportunity to make some purchases for inventory or property, plant & equipment before the end of the year, so you can get the tax benefit in the current year.

Tax Planning: Consult with your tax preparer to discuss what they expect or need from you for any applicable tax filing processes. Further, they can provide consultation on whether any new laws and regulations could have an impact on how you manage your business or your tax planning.

By addressing the above items, you can alleviate the stress of the year-end accounting process.

A fully-documented Client Procedures Manual is one of the benefits you’ll receive from outsourcing your bookkeeping and accounting services to Consultance Accounting.

From our many experiences with onboarding small and medium-sized organizations, we understand documenting how things are done behind the scenes takes a back seat to the more pressing items, such as obtaining funding and growing and serving your members, customer and other stakeholders. Initially, most new clients do not have clearly articulated accounting policies and procedures.

As you grow, it’s important to clearly document your core back office processes. This is especially true if you currently rely on one person to do most of this work. Without such information, things can easily slip through the cracks if that person is unable to do the work due to unplanned events.

Five Key Benefits to having a Policies and Procedures Manual:

Structure and Accountability – It’s easier for things to work successfully when the rules are clear and they’re easy to find. An up-to-date, central location for your policies and procedures facilitates smoother operations by promoting clear and consistent expectations.

Internal Controls – Give your stakeholders the peace of mind that you’ve addressed one of the basic building blocks in a strong internal control system: having policies and procedures that are designed to provide reasonable assurance of the achievement of business objectives.

Business Continuity – having written policies and procedures allows you to efficiently cross-train staff and allows you to scale up more effectively as you grow.

Increased Efficiency –When there’s a clear understanding of who does what, you’ll avoid duplication of efforts among individuals and minimize micro-management.

Continuous Improvement – In our fast-paced environment, businesses must regularly assess and improve their operations. Formal policies and procedures facilitate this process by providing the basis for assessing your current state, so that you can move on to envisioning your desired future state.

The Path Toward BetterAccounting Operations

As part of Consultance Accounting’s onboarding process, we analyze each new client’s current operations and assess its needs, to identify and implement the most effective and efficient workflows for core processes. Core accounting processes cover, but are not limited to: Accounts Payable (i.e., processing all bills and payments), Accounts Receivable (i.e., processing all invoices and receipts), Payroll and the monthly Closing Process, which culminates in the issuance of meaningful financial reports. Once we’ve reengineered a client’s business processes and optimized the design of their accounting system, we create a formal Client Procedures Manual. The following provides a high-level overview:

Our client procedures manuals allow us to provide exceptional client service by facilitating a thorough and consistent approach based on strong internal controls to protect the organization’s resources and ensure accurate and timely financial statements. Contact Us if you’d like us a Demo.